londongrip.co.uk
Welcome to London Grip, a forum for reviews of books, shows & events – plus quarterly postings of new poetry.
Our most recent posts are listed below. Older posts can be explored via the search box and topic list.
For more information & guidelines on submitting reviews or poems please visit our Home page.

Feb 25 2015

# London Grip New Poetry – Spring 2015

*

This issue of London Grip features new poems by:

*Caroline Natzler *Paul McLoughlin *Yvonne Green *Sally Long *David Cooke *Chris Hardy
*Thomas Ovans *Neil Fulwood *John Forth *Carolyn Yates *Deborah Mason
*Marilyn Hammick *Sofia Amina *Elizabeth Smither *Christopher Mulrooney *Jean Atkin *Robert Nisbet *Fiona Sinclair *Keith Nunes *Steve Komarnyckyj *Robert Ferns

Copyright of all poems remains with the contributors

.

A printer-friendly version of London Grip New Poetry
can be obtained at LG new poetry Spring 2015

.

Please send submissions to poetry@londongrip.co.uk,
enclosing no more than three poems
(in the message body or as a single attachment)
together with a brief, 2-3 line, biography

.

.
Editor’s introduction

This spring posting begins (a little late, perhaps) by acknowledging the turning of another year and then goes on to embrace a quite diverse range of themes. A small clutch of poems about clothing – alluded to by our main cover picture – exists alongside couple of light romantic interludes and some darker reflections on abuses of power. But the subjects to which contributors in this issue have turned most frequently are the sea and seafaring. Readers will find themselves on ships, piers and beaches; and as well as meeting sailors and holidaymakers, they can expect to run into more exotic and elusive aquatic creatures…

We trust that all these journeys and encounters will prove enjoyable.

Hardly a week goes by without our Facebook communications department becoming aware of yet another on-line poetry magazine. While such a multiplying of poetry outlets is on the whole to be welcomed, it is also forces the editorial staff of London Grip New Poetry to keep on its collective toes – or else our readers and contributors may migrate elsewhere. In light of which, we draw attention to the fact that we have made slight changes of layout in the printable version of the magazine. We shall be grateful for any comments on this, or any other aspect of production or content..

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs

http://mikeb-b.blogspot.com/

Back to poet list… Forward to first poem

***

Caroline Natzler: The old year and the new

    I hold life close to my chest
    all that has happened is hushed

    the only people are faces in the snow

    I shuffle through my warm home routines
    keep vigil for the year that is going and will remain.

    For you, origins are nothing

    you want to go dancing, flash into fireworks
    kick the dust from your flip-flops and be off.

Caroline Natzler’s poetry collections are Design Fault (Flambard Press), Smart Dust (Grenadine Press) and Fold (Hearing Eye). Caroline teaches creative writing at the City Lit in London and also runs private workshops.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Paul McLoughlin: 2014: Another Year

i.m. John Hartley Williams (& Ken Smith) and Barry Cole (& B.S .Johnson)

    There were no floral tributes
    in Jenbacher Weg or Myddleton Square
    from those they didn’t know. Two
    extraordinaries from the ordinary world.

    One saw what was real in the surreal – was
    reassured by those not baffled by it – loved
    a friend he called the proper poet. The other
    loved a novelist till tiring of the gloom.
    Both knew thinking life was money
    was another way of being poor.

    The first, pissed-off, withdrew a piece to find
    a house-proud editor’s dumb-friendly ‘Okeydokey’
    in an email. The other smiled at a quest
    to trace connections and said thank you
    for support beyond the call of duty,
    though I need reminding what I did.

    And we were pleased they wrote and wrote
    so we could read and read. They did more
    than shuffle words around a page. They had
    their champions and that will have to do.

Paul McLoughlin’s most recent collection is The Road to Murreigh (2010). He has also edited and written an introduction for Brian Jones: New & Selected Poems (2014). Both from Shoestring Press.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Yvonne Green: The Poetry of Propaganda

In Memory of Vasily Grossman and Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin

    The sound of truth dying
    Death made holy
    Women and children’s lives
    Traded in lachrymosa,
    The factioned blood of the terrified
    Who aren’t invited to contribute,
    Their job is to be afraid,
    Quietly,
    They’ve been trained,
    Mechanised, automated.
    Their reflexes honed
    While they slept,
    Lullabied by slogans, histories,
    Promises, threats
    Transported away from themselves,

    They learned to call their shadows
    Enemy, to stand away from them,
    First to let other people kick them senseless
    Then to watch the terrified open veins
    Using carvers,
    Parers,
    Nail scissors,
    Diaper pins,

    Then there are those among them
    Who bring out food, humanity,
    They are also guilty.

lachrymosa, – vials in which tears are stored

.

Yvonne Green’s publications include Selected Poems and Translations(Smith/Doorstop 2015), After Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin (Smith/Doorstop 2011), a Poetry Book Society Commended Translation, Hanisoo Yi (Am Oved 2010), The Assay (Smith/Doorstop 2009), and Boukhara (Smith/Doorstop 2008) ,a Poetry Business Pamphlet Prize winner.
Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Sally Long: At the Gate of the Commandant’s Garden

    Plunged into fire,
    metal made malleable
    for skilled hands to tap
    rose blushing iron into delicate filigree.
    .

The garden of the Commandant’s house at Auschwitz concentration camp

    You may interpret the pattern as you will.
    Some have seen flowers in the fragile tracery,
    fashioned for the one who daily tended these lawns,
    the scrolls curling upwards become
    the leaves of tulips he planted in the beds.

    Others have noted hearts shattered by
    the depravity of the human soul,
    cruel acts made concrete by scrolls
    that metamorphose into smoke
    curling from incinerators
    adjacent to gas chambers.

    Make of it what you will.
    As you pause,
    trying to make up your mind
    the gate swings open,
    a child stands suspended
    between heaven and hell.

.

Sally Long has an MA in Creative Writing from UEL and is a PhD student at Exeter. Her poems have appeared in Agenda, Ink, Sweat and Tears, London Grip, Prole and Snakeskin. Sally edits Allegro Poetry Magazine

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

David Cooke: Apprentices

Grimsby c.1880

    Consigned to the hellbound lurching
    of smacks, we were a back street surplus,
    a poorhouse dross with tainted blood.
    Worth less than slaves or cattle
    that have to be bought or reared,
    we were the spillage of couplings
    in damp infested rooms.

    A lost brood of liars and thieves,
    predisposed to mischief, we were damned
    from the moment our lungs cleared –
    swaddled in filth and howling.
    Hollow chested, intractable, we were unfit
    for a uniform or even a grave
    on some frittering ledge of the empire.

    So fetched up here instead
    in this port of outlaws, signed over
    to masters whose pockets jangled coin,
    but soon grew intolerant
    of stubborn mumblings
    and fumbled attempts at fourteen
    to match the skills and muscles of men.

    For each God-bothering skipper
    there were plenty more who’d bait us
    or look the other way when deckies,
    cooks and mates tried to tame us
    with ‘good natured ribbing’
    that always went too far: their mock
    ‘executions’ and acts that ‘never happened’.

    We came in our thousands to learn
    the value of a rudimentary trade,
    with droves absconding to the haven
    we found in Lincoln Gaol: written off,
    released. Others perished hauling lines,
    or slipped from the rigging, barely missed,
    their details logged in a spindling script.

.

David Cooke’s retrospective collection, In the Distance, was published in 2011 by Night Publishing. A new collection, Work Horses, was published by Ward Wood in 2012. His poems and reviews have appeared in the UK, Ireland and beyond in journals such as Agenda, The Bow Wow Shop, The Interpreter’s House, The Irish Press, The London Magazine, Magma, The Morning Star The North, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Reader, The SHOp & Stand. He has two collections forthcoming: A Murmuration (Two Rivers Press, 2015) and After Hours (Cultured Llama Press 2017).

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Chris Hardy: Laugh – I Nearly Died

    In the house with Rose
    and Jenny, Alice and Florrie,
    noisy girls in the kitchen
    at breakfast time, soon off to work
    in Jay’s the Milliners, or the basement
    under Mrs Lewis’s clothes shop.
    They slam the door, leaving the baby
    with gentle, unlettered Jane,
    who will wash and clean and cook
    before they all come home.

    On scraps of paper they laugh
    and lift their skirts as the waves
    touch their bare, white feet.
    Or on a bench, skirts pulled up,
    legs folded under, they lean against
    each other, looking straight into
    the camera laughing so
    the photographs when they come back
    will show that everything is fine.

    Rose sits on a deckchair wearing
    her coat and hat. It’s Summer
    and a child in a swimming costume
    is digging in the sand.
    Rose looks through her glasses
    and smiles. She keeps
    her knees together, her skirt
    pulled down and on her lap
    she firmly holds
    her handbag in two hands.

Chris Hardy’s poems have appeared in the Rialto, Poetry Review, the North and many other magazines, anthologies, (eg The Forward Prize), and websites. He has won prizes in the National Poetry Society’s and other competitions. His third collection was published by Graft Poetry www.graftpoetry.co.uk . He plays guitar in the trio LiTTLe MACHiNe (little-machine.com) performing settings of well-known poems

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Thomas Ovans: Transatlantic

    Her surging thoughts and memories
    are bracketed by breakers striding in
    then stumbling up this English evening beach.

    .    Each grey-brown wave’s capricious mix
    .    of molecules and droplets gathers
    .    round a hollow arc of air and seconds
    .    as if drawing breath until

    .    momentum slumps and deadweight volume
    .    spreads to fizz like sherbet
    .    on the shore’s rough tongue.
    .    The foamy leading edges creep uphill
    .    against the shelving shingle’s friction.

    .    Some reach an inch or two beyond the rest:
    .    but gravity and undertow, relentless,
    .    put a stop to any scuttling
    .    over shiny pebbles; and subdued,
    .    they sidle back into the shrugging sea.

    Six time zones away, her family
    assembles to remember how
    one life achieved what proved to be its peak –
    then, over stony months, it drained away.

Thomas Ovans is one of London Grip’s regular poetry reviewers but is now attempting to re-ignite the spark of his own creativity.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Neil Fulwood: Whatever Happened

    I can't trust my memories. Last year
    is a fuzzy question mark, never mind
    the landscape of a decade
    without internet or mobile phones.

    Someone jammed a breeze block
    on the IT accelerator and stunt-dived
    out of the '80s, leaving them ploughing
    towards the millennium. You've seen

    the movie: a disaster epic with a cast
    of thousands, most of them uncredited
    as collateral damage. A quantum leap
    from the '70s that I think I remember

    (we didn't have a colour TV till '76
    or maybe later) though I can't be sure,
    looking back from a plateau
    of social media, whether the images

    I'm slapping in the face of the present
    have been signed off as accurate
    or revealed as an identikit collage
    of tan leather and Hillman Hunters,

    Jack Regan and working men's pubs,
    Bob and Terry and beer and birds
    and the sense even then of change
    in the air. I can't trust my memories.
    I strongly suspect the feeling's mutual.

.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
***

Neil Fulwood: Ingoldmells, 1970s

    Holidays were self-catering,
    snapshots an exercise
    in composition. Ma never really
    had a break. The sun
    was always in our eyes.

.

Neil Fulwood is the author of film studies book The Films of Sam Peckinpah. His poetry has been featured in The Morning Star, Butcher’s Dog, Prole, Art Decades, The Black Light Engine Room and Ink Sweat & Tears.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

John Forth: The Older Mermaid

    I’m down at the pier
    dangling my feet over
    and throwing stones,
    having gambled my last
    coin in a cascade-machine,
    when she swims into view.

    You won’t remember me
    she says, and I agree
    although she’s wrong.
    She’d said how hard life is
    among fish after flitting
    between the elements.

    Not that I’ve much to offer.
    She’s called me a listener
    and even today with nowhere
    to go but back and nothing
    to watch but sea, says
    she can tell me anything.

    Maybe I ought to tell her
    I never understand a word she says,
    but I hold back as usual,
    pondering the swirl of
    water knocking unevenly
    against a broken jetty.

    She’s smiling, as they do,
    wondering has she said
    too much. I’m slow to respond
    and it’s mistaken for tact.
    Besides, the sun’s setting.
    Why spoil a nice day out?

.

John Forth grew up in Bethnal Green and now lives by the sea in North Somerset. Low Maintenance: New & Selected Poems is due in 2015 from Rockingham.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Carolyn Yates: On The Beach at Gaza

with acknowledgment to Adrian Mitchell

    The rubble holds her foot.
    Each careful step cradled to the damp packed sand,
    tracker footsteps stalking the tidemark edge.
    She kneels. Shutter-quick she
    catches the football’s black and white geometry.
    Distant shouts, beached waves,
    the thrum of baked black tarmac
    a soundtrack to infinity.

    Out in the border-sea,
    the fishing boat a still-life wreck of red and blue,
    a hulk, forever sliding back on her periphery.
    Camera ready she prowls, close now to her quarry,
    her brain reels in the sudden percussion.
    Her practised eye notes the missile’s vapour trail,
    the small boy fists saluting their short defiance.
    She has her National Geographic moment.

.

From 1996 to the outbreak of the second Intifada I was the lead consultant on an education reform project funded by the Department for International Development, working with the Palestinian National Authority. I visited Gaza and the West Bank every three months. I have walked on that Gaza beach where the small boys playing football were blasted by rockets last year. The pictures on TV brought it all back, like a photo. I thought of Adrian Mitchell’s ‘On the Beach…’ as a title for a poem I could not write then. I was in Ramallah when our consultants were evacuated back to UK as the fighting broke out. I stopped doing overseas consultancy work and forged a new career after that. It has taken this long for me to try to distil my experience of alienation with the media coverage of the second intifada, triggered by the recent upsurge of violence in Gaza, this time mediated and communicated via social networks.
.
Carolyn Yates works for Wigtown Festival Company and is responsible for regional Literature Development in Dumfries and Galloway. She writes for performance, as well as poetry and non-fiction. As one half of Buskers, she will perform a spoken word show ‘Divine Discontent’ in the Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival in May 2015.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Deborah Mason: With Van Gogh in the olive grove

    Gold-flecked thumbs
    pressed into her face
    imprinting the sun’s whorls.
    The sky vibrated.
    She fell into the spiky grass
    under the olive trees.
    Brushwood dug into her back.

    The ash blue trees
    swirled darkly above her,
    lurching feverishly.
    The heat shimmered.

    She panted, dazed.
    The bearded man stared,
    wild-eyed, appalled.
    Passion spurted
    from his fingertips
    as he hurried away.

    She clutched her ear, dazzled.

.

Deborah Mason is a member of the Back Room Poets in Oxford. Her poems have been published in various journals and anthologies, most recently in The Book of Love and Loss edited by R.V. Bailey and June Hall.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Marilyn Hammick: The Uninvited Cell

    You arrive without warning, with nothing to show
    you’re not part of the normal tissue crowd
    where coming and going happen all the time.

    You thrive on my hospitality, breed on my sustenance.
    and for a while you act like the regulars
    - the cells lengthening my nails, lining my gut,

    until I spot slippage from your red wrap
    and one small scrape reveals your identity.
    Time to say goodbye, when I wake up, you’ll be gone.

.

Marilyn Hammick writes at home in England and France, and can also be found stitching, walking or on her yoga mat. Her poems have appeared in Prole, The Linnet’s Wings, The Interpreter’s House and in other print and online journals.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Sofia Amina: No U-Turn Allowed

    I begin once again
    running up this ancient hill
    wearing my shoes
    the wrong way around
    my jumper is inside out
    and my hair
    falling out
    and ten baby hedgehogs
    scurrying away
    from me and my shadow

    I look around and my shadow has gone
    she is running away
    with the spoon and fork in her hands

    I turn away from this path
    the path I have always taken
    and run through the overgrown forest

.

Sofia lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she eats toast, drinks tea and writes Her work has recently appeared in Ink, Sweat and Tears and she was also a guest poet at Beattie & Scratchmann’s 2014 Edinburgh Fringe show ‘Get Put Down’

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Elizabeth Smither: Wearing fur

    My coat of honey-coloured rabbit fur
    incites two black Labradors to sniff and nip.
    I hang it on a hatstand out of reach.

    It breathes softly from my restaurant chair
    an ordinary woman eating dal makhani
    until I stand and someone stares.

    Someone bold, flamboyantly dressed
    and hogging the conversation. Silence falls
    as I shrug it about my shoulders

    and saunter down the aisle to pay.
    Who can pay for soft atmosphere
    and flesh that carries its own candles

    like Caravaggio, under a chin
    seeking the shape and obliterating it
    by beautiful light and warmth?

.

Elizabeth Smither’s most recent publication is a little suite of poems for her granddaughter, Ruby Duby Du, (Cold Hub Press, 2014). She has just been awarded the Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Christopher Mulrooney: argument

    have you cuffs on old boy
    what you mean cuffs
    you know curled ends
    I don’t think so have a look
    have done that’s why I ask
    must have then so what
    nothing old man cuffs I mean
    they catch the pips I spit out

.

Christopher Mulrooney is the author of Grimaldi (Fowlpox Press)

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Jean Atkin: Button

    If she hadn’t seen him then, by the power-assisted
    door of the Library, look down, his fingers exploring
    the rumples in his coat.  If she had missed the humour
    in him, as he discovered his mis-buttoning.

    If he hadn’t acknowledged his public error by looking
    swiftly up and catching her eye and smiling,
    so self-deprecating, so oddly
    intimate.  If he hadn’t been middle-aged.

    If he hadn’t smiled at her, like that, in only
    seconds she would have walked on past him
    through the door and everything
    would have been otherwise.

.

Jean Atkin works as a poet and educator, and lives in Shropshire. Her first collection Not Lost Since Last Time is published by Oversteps Books, and she has also published four pamphlets. She is currently Poet in Residence at Wenlock Poetry Festival 2015 and Reader in Residence for Southwater Library in Telford. www.jeanatkin.com

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Robert Nisbet: Bedroom

    A few nights now in each other’s company
    and they wake to the mean mew of peacocks.
    But the open window also brings them
    the smell of farm (eggs dug from dung and straw,
    the fainter hay). The noise of car and bus,
    a furlong’s reach away, is muted.
    Within, the cutlery sounds of B&B.
    A clock chimes from a distant room.

    They gaze for a while at the eight o’clock ceiling,
    read runes. The light is mottling, changing,
    but when, so readily, it brightens,
    the leaf-lines are waving, breeze-shifted,
    moving with September morning,
    and its generous wafer of summer left.

.

Robert Nisbet was for some years an associate lecturer in creative writing at TrinityCollege, Carmarthen. His short stories appear in his collection Downtrain (Parthian, 2004) and in the anthology Story II (Parthian, 2014), his poems in magazines like The Frogmore Papers, The Interpreter’s House, Dream Catcher, The Journal and Prole, and in his collection Merlin’s Lane (Prolebooks, 2011)

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Fiona Sinclair: Absent Friends

    In M&S, her Look at this, Look at this, Look at this,
    curtails again my own attempts to browse.
    I teeter on the edge of slapping her,
    cool off in the men’s department.
    Repentant, bear half her packages to Costa Coffee
    buy cappuccino and cake, because she did the driving love.

    Nearby, a middle aged woman huddles over her Kindle,
    carrier bags as cover in case stood up,
    a second woman stoops to search her features for girlish traces,
    speaks her name with question mark.
    Their embrace brings a friendship back from the dead,
    then chaotic questioning as they sit with beaming emoticon faces.

    A thickening in my throat as I remember:
    the man whose weekly calls bi- polar swung between suicide strategy
    and stomach cramping wit, who no longer phones me,
    the woman whose getaway van I drove beyond
    the reach of a husband’s fists who has Facebook defriended me,
    because my slot machine life suddenly paid out the windfall of a husband …

    These two women never quite trashed
    youthful remembrance of hennaed hair and flares,
    whereas I am an amnesiac memory that no prompts
    of Dickens, handbags, Paris will revive.
    So I wrestle with yawns as a screed of texts sent to a lover
    are read to me once more by a rebound friend.

.

Fiona Sinclair’s first full collection Ladies who Lunch was published in 2015 by Lapwing Press, Belfast. She is the editor of the on-line poetry magazine Message in a Bottle,

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Keith Nunes: plain thinking

    out on the treed plains of a cluttered mind
    swerving to miss
    skeletal remains of cupboard fears,
    bouncing
    off grief-encrusted choices,
    slapping leathered legs
    and she rumbles into the scene:
    "you can't come back baby,
    once too many"
    you gracefully careen through the windscreen

.

Keith Nunes is a former “this” and a current “that”. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and widely published in NZ and increasingly in the US and the UK with flashes of fiction and poems.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Steve Komarnyckyj: nowhere

     there are times you just want to drive or walk
    nowhere – the place that everyone has been to
    but is marked on no maps      and starting
    the car or stepping out of the door
    you follow your intuition to the end of the road
    taking a right or a left
     pausing to admire a cloudscape
    the movement of light on the river

    and these events cohere into a narrative
    that does not differ from the story
    you were telling yourself anyway
    even in the silence when you looked in the mirror
    at the face you have worn
    which at that moment you are most alone
    feels alien but familial a stranger
    you have grown comfortable with

    walking with you in footsteps not your own
    or driving past
    industrial estates at the edge of town
    or stepping into the forest
    offering the illusion of paths
    a Gordian knot of infinitely looped possibilities
    among flattened grass
    snapped twigs

    but only now you realise
    the only way to arrive at nowhere
    is to forget that you are travelling
    and it happens suddenly
    the steps coming to a halt
    the bicycle slanted on the five bar gate
    the car pulled over in a layby
    a car park    grass    hills      tree

    the derelict factory
    or church      the house
    whose door you open
    the stile where you sit
    the car with the engine cooling
    the darkness where you settle
    knowing that whatever you look at
    nowhere is as beautiful

    as nowhere

.

Steve Komarnyckyj‘s literary translations and poems have appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, The North, and Modern Poetry in Translation. His book of translations from the Ukrainian poet Pavlo Tychyna was published by Poetry Salzburg in 2011. His translation of Vasyl Shkliar’s Ukrainian novel Raven was published in April 2013. His last book of translated poetry, A Flight Over the Black Sea was the recipient of an English PEN award in 2014. He has recently appeared in the Transatlantic Poetry Series of on air readings in an event hosted by Fjords Review. He runs Kalyna Language Press with his partner Susie and three domestic cats.

Back to poet list… Forward to next poem

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

***

Robert Ferns: The Shooting Gallery

     The shooting gallery
    Stands by the Madhouse
    In the Looney Toons
    Asylum Headquarters.
    It sways in the wind,
    Changes its face
    In every direction,
    Fluttering like
    A deck of cards.

    In the hall of mirrors
    Choices are reflected
    Like shreds of gherkin:
    Each scrap a piece
    By itself,
    But coming from,
    A single seed.

    As I approach the
    Building I see past
    Myself and into the
    Glass. My eyes are
    Soon deafened by news
    Of equity loans,
    Overcrowding and
    Divorce separation legislation.
    If I could see their
    True motive then maybe
    I might understand what
    It is that I don’t.

    These helical tops
    And glacial structures
    Provide transparency
    To passers-by.
    Each floor has
    A glass ceiling;
    Each level
    Recedes to a
    Pyramid point.
    A clearer hierarchy
    Cannot be seen
    Throughout the land.

    As suits push numbers,
    Ties choke people
    To Silence. The shard
    Of glass reaches
    The clouds. On each
    Floor there is less air
    To breathe and more wealth
    To swallow.
    I can only build
    This because I am
    Here and not up there.
    I built this.
    I build it to knock
    It down again.

.

Robert Ferns is a poet from the Highlands of Scotland. His work contains the influence of his father, cycling and going between places he calls ‘home’. He is also a passionate cyclist and has climbed Alpe d’huez twice. You can find some of his other poems in The Muse: An International Journal of Poetry, streetcake, The Lake and Ancient Heart Magazine.

Back to poet list…
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

### Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.